I have nearly completed a novella, WILD WAYS which is about a woman, a storyteller, who had become sanitized living in the city. With her partner, Jack and their small daughter, Bel, she returns to the small, stone cottage of her dreams. Here they live happily for three years. She gets back in touch with her wildness within and recovers her powers of story telling which disappeared when she became over-domesticated in the city. Here is a short extract about a night she spends with a vixen...
Something woke me in the dead of night.
I sat up.
A scent of musk: glandular, strangely sensual,
drifting through the open window.
And when I looked, she was there, standing
in a pool of
moonlight.
Her amber
eyes met mine awakening something inside me.
Outside, the vixen pointed her muzzle into the air.
Adrenalin flooded my body.
She spun in a circle,
her pelt catching spears of moonlight, glanced haughtily over
her shoulder barking, as if to say:
‘Follow me!’
So, I did.
The morning ghosted in green as we trotted between oak trees
following a track long forgotten.
A
faint line through tall grass, a desire path, another way
from here to there.
A place of vibrating
energy, half-forgotten things, other-dimensional.
I stopped to quench my thirst at the stream.
Foraging for insects and earthworms, sniffing the air: bark,
sap, mulch.
My nose twitched.
My ears
pricked.
The fur
lifted along my spine.
As I dropped to
my haunches, leapt a long leap.
A flurry
of
leaf litter.
The
excitement and fear a tangible taste on my tongue.
A squeal as I bit down hard on
the rabbit’s neck, twisting it this way and that, slurping
hot blood.
A savage snapping.
I tore its head
clean off, cracked its skull with my molars.
Gorging richly on its brain, slashing its
chest, tearing the
soft belly, spilling blubbery ropes of purple and blue,
scarlet too.
I gobbled it all up, then delicately
licked myself clean.
Satiated, I curled under the roots of an oak tree, smelling acorns
and leaves, the malty earth.
A
clean, cold calm penetrated my bones.
As I felt a presence far bigger than me, one
which endured in
my memory.
I
blinked.
The vixen on her paws, flicked
her brush.
In a flash she was off.
Flickers
of rust-red ignited by cloud breaks.
And I watched her, until she disappeared deep
into the forest like a mystery.
